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Playing violent first-person video games such as Call of Duty does not make people more prone to violence themselves, a major new study has found.

Scientists using brain scans and psychological questionnaires discovered that the levels of aggression and capacity for empathy in people who never play violent games were the same as in those who game for hours each day.

The research question arises first from the fact that the popularity and the quality of video games are increasingDr Gregor Szycik, Hannover Medical School

The research debunks years of warnings, partly prompted by previous academic studies, that crime and antisocial behaviour is increasingly linked to the rising popularity of "shooter" video games.

In 2015, one politician even blamed a spate of gun violence in Salford on “a diet of war games and Grand Theft Auto”.

Grand Theft Auto 5, where players can become part of a virtual criminal gang challenged to commit ever more audacious and violent crimes, is currently number one in the Game top 20 chart of most popular video games.

However, the academics behind the new research say previous studies may have been skewed because they often assessed participants’ psychological state immediately after, or even during, a stint of violent gaming.

By contrast, the new survey carried out by Hannover Medical School waited at least three hours before conducting the tests, in order to determine the more long-term psychological effects.

Grand Theft Auto 5 is one of the most popular games on the marketCredit:
Reuters

A group of gamers who had played for at least two hours a day - though in many cases nearer four - for the last four years were compared with a control group of people who did not game regularly.

To evaluate their capacity for empathy and aggression, parpicipants from both groups answered psychological questionnaires.

Then, while their brains were being scanned in an MRI machine, they were shown a series of images designed to provoke an emotional and empathetic response.

As the images appeared, the participants were asked to imagine how they would feel if they were involved in the depicted situation.

The questionnaire revealed no differences in levels of aggression between gamers and non-gamers, a finding that was backed up by the MRI data, which revealed similar neural responses between the two groups.

"We hope that the study will encourage other research groups to focus their attention on the possible long-term effects of video games on human behavior," said Dr. Gregor Szycik, who led the research.

He acknowledged, however, that his study was partly prompted by a rise in the number of patients seeking clinical help for video game addiction.